


The Other Laura Palmer

by mintpearlvoice



Category: Twin Peaks, Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-23
Updated: 2014-04-23
Packaged: 2018-01-20 11:26:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1508807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mintpearlvoice/pseuds/mintpearlvoice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Laura Palmer, Cecil's sister, feels that she might be another Laura Palmer entirely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Laura likes horses and unicorns and other quadrupeds, and rainbows too. But she especially likes to pretend that she is Laura Palmer. She plays this by hiding behind the curtains and squeezing her eyes tight tight tight shut and holding her breath. Go away, she prays, whenever someone comes near, or she hides inside a cabinet or under her bed and listens for something horrible, but no one ever bothers her.  
Laura has a child’s instinct for the macabre.

“What if I am not Laura Palmer?” Laura Palmer asks one night. Her older brother Cecil is putting her to bed because their mother is out. “I mean, what if I’m actually Laura Palmer, or even Laura Palmer’s cousin, Laura Palmer? I mean, what if I am?”  
“You’re the only Laura for me,” he says, and gives her a kiss on the top of the head after seeing her lean in for one.  
Instead of going to bed they swing dance to old vinyls and eat a bag of popcorn each. It is past midnight by the time they go to sleep, but Mom says it’s all right.

Laura Palmer’s next door neighbor is Audrey Horne. Her mother owns the B&B, and her brother uses a neat machine to talk for him. Audrey talks when she wants to, which is often.

She has magazine holders full of fashion catalogs, and her mother gives her all her lipsticks when they’re only halfway done. Her favorite thing to do is interview travelers and write down everything they say. Then Johnny types her notes into newspaper articles.  
Neither Horne child can swing dance at all, but Laura thinks the way Audrey sways to the music is just as neat.

One day they’re sitting in Audrey’s pink bedroom, sucking on chocolate cigarettes. Audrey gets up and twirls even though there aren’t any records on, and Laura tries to copy her. At last they sit on Audrey’s bed.  
“I want to be in black-and-white movies when I grow up. I’ll have a million pairs of shoes and a husband who gives me five hundred kisses every day, and when I drive by in my convertible everyone will stop whatever they’re doing and run outside to see me pass. What about you, Laura?”  
“Joan of Arc,” she says, and rolls onto her back and stretches out her arms like she’s been crucified. “An angel… maybe an exorcist.”

 

When Laura is twelve she sits down on the school toilet and pulls down her pants and sees smears of blood. Of course she’s been warned but it feels surreal.  
She can feel another Laura Palmer, someone with eyes a little bluer and hair a little longer and jeans less ripped.  
Laura Palmer, we’re both bleeding. Laura Palmer, now we match. She laughs a little and tries to figure out which one she is. For a moment it’s the school heating that’s broken instead of the air conditioning; there are no rainbows in her room.  
Audrey knocks hard on the stall door. “Laura, are you still there? I need your makeup remover. My mascara smudged.”   
That shifts the world back into place.

 

That night she goes out to the canyon behind their house. There are snakes at night, so she pulls on her boots.  
“I’m Laura Palmer,” she yells, cupping her hands around her mouth.  
PALMER, the echo bounces back. LAURA PALMER. She screams until everything is resounding Laura and her throat is raw. 

In her dream that night she learns that every Laura Palmer is an angel child in human skin, but not every Laura Palmer figures it out while they're still alive; for amongst wicked heartless creatures of all sorts there is no better prize than bagging a Laura Palmer brightlit openheart girlchild soul and torturing it until it romanticizes its own death. She learns that Night Vale has curled in upon itself, possessive as a cat, to keep her safe, and one day she will do something great enough to more than make up for it.  
She learns that angels are watching over her, that she is better than she thinks she is, that she will shine. Laura Palmer comes noiselessly into her room; she is made of light and wrapped in light, the most alive person that Laura Palmer has ever seen, and says something that Laura Palmer doesn't quite hear but still she feels herself fill up with love.  
She says something back and then Laura Palmer draws close to her bedside and gives her a frosty vintage lipstick kiss right between her eyes, a kiss she will carry for the rest of her life like an unconcious talisman, a ring that's never taken off. 

When she wakes up she thinks of writing her dream down, but she doesn't because angels aren't real, so she goes back to sleep. In the morning she writes in her fake diary and her real diary and cleans up blood. She feels like Laura Palmer, but like Laura Palmer too.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings for mentions in passing of incest, abuse, and sexual trafficking  
> also marijuana

Whatever Laura does, she does it like a girl possessed. She hikes out into the wild with a canvas and paints giant spiraling colorful surreal murals full of her own poetry.  
LAURA PALMER, mixed media, WHEN I STOPPED BURNING I LEARNED HOW TO GLOW.  
LAURA PALMER, mixed media, I WILL NOT SET FIRE TO MYSELF TO KEEP YOU WARM.

She teaches, too- consent workshops, kink workshops, sex ed down at the middle school. Cecil's proudest moment was when he was able to give her sister her own radio show, phone lines rigged so that she could answer questions from people all over the world.  
Mostly Laura goes on strange quests of her own devising, and she rarely returns alone.

 

Laura comes home at 4 PM on a lazy summer afternoon when there's blueberry pie cooling on the windowsill shepherding a pale thin girl with a frightened look.

Laura comes home at three in the morning, a gunshot scratch across her cheekbone, and leans on the horn to jolt him out of bed. The quiet girl who follows her into the house wears a modest pastel dress that must be awful in this all-permeating August heat.

Laura comes home at five in the afternoon, utterly exhausted but tirelessly cheerful, with a large woman dressed in ill-fitting clothes and tear-ruined mascara, and her two skinny children, a boy and a girl, have never seen a cactus before and attempt climbing the one in the back yard while Cecil is making dinner.  
That goes about as well as you'd expect.

What Laura does, most of all, is bring home strays.  
"This is Elizaveta Steed," she'll say, or "This is Lenora Ruby Jessop" or "This is Janice, and this is Devon, and this is Carla Mae. I'm sorry, what did you tell me your maiden name was again?"

And, so Cecil knows what not to bring up, she'll subtly sign to him:  
Russian immigrant, victim of sexual trafficking.   
Or   
She just escaped a polygamist cult. I'm going back for her sisters next week.  
Or, pinky up for furious emphasis:  
He fucked her kids.  
He makes up her room for her: curtains closed, window closed, nightlight always. Finds places for whoever she's brought home to sleep, their house or someone else's house or a room at the Great Southern if whoever-it-is has kids, and throws something in the slow cooker for tomorrow.  
She stays for about a month, helping whoever it is settle into the town, until so-and-so the refugee becomes so-and-so who lives at the old Flores place, or so-and-so who works down at the malt shop, or so-and-so top of her eighth grade class. Laura Palmer home again,   
going to a munch or two, maybe a play party, watching out for scene newbies like a wary mother hen. She'll go to Audrey's or Donna-and-Bobby's afterwards for cuddles and peppermint tea, show off the bruises on her wrists and talk herself to sleep;  
teach a few workshops, mooch off of Carlos's home-grown Night Vale Kush, maybe disappear into the wild with her horse and her diary and her art supplies and come back with a new masterpiece-   
but then she's off again.

Cecil can't imagine leaving Night Vale, or broadcasting from anywhere other than his office, but Laura, lighting up the world, has no such preferences. Sometimes she's having a car chase or going undercover or she's just been shot, and she'll do her best to call Cecil and let him know what's going on so that he can call Audrey to cover for her- but whenever and wherever Laura can, she does her show.

"...and I just feel just awful. I mean, girls shouldn't want to tie up and hit other girls. This is the modern era, and I'm a feminist. I'm not a bad person. Oh, Laura, I try so hard..."  
"It's okay, Amber. You're going to be all right. You're not bad or dirty for wanting what you want. You are a good person, and if it comes from a pure and true place of love inside of you, or a place of excitement or fun or just wanting to try new things, then what you want is good. It's okay to want things for yourself sometimes. It's okay. Now I want you to repeat after me: I love and accept every part of myself. I am a good person. I am enough."  
"I am a good person," the girl says shakily. And then, starting to cry. "I am enough."  
Right. Now you work on believing that, okay? And no matter what anyone might say about how you like to fuck, you keep believing that you're as good as gold, because it's the truth."  
"Thank you, Laura Palmer."  
"Don't thank me. Thank yourself for existing. You're going to light up the whole sky one day, I just know it."  
His sister is neat and he is so very proud of her.

Laura Palmer smells like jasmine and apricots and sleepy kittens and other people's cannabis. Whatever Laura does, she does it like a girl possessed- but self-possessed might be the better term, except that she loves everyone she meets just as much as she loves herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The titles of Laura's paintings come from poems by tumblr users egracely and inkskinned.


End file.
